Nonconsensual sex is always wrong, but that doesn’t mean consensual sex is always right.
Whether or not the student who would come to be known as Jane Doe — at the time under the influence of alcohol and ketamine, in an upstairs room full of fraternity brothers — had agreed at some point to sex has become a flashpoint in the discourse around Cornell University’s rape investigation. But regardless of where one falls on that debate, we should all be able to name the way a 20-year-old sophomore was treated by her peers as degrading and perverse, deserving of sanction regardless of the legal outcome of the case. And while the dozens of frat brothers who were sent a Snapchat message advertising an intoxicated woman as “free pussy” were not under legal obligation to intervene, their broad refusal to do so should also be regarded as a moral failure.
The lurid account has haunted the public imagination since The Cornell Daily Sun, a student newspaper, published the details in mid-September. While the alleged assault happened in 2024, its re-emergence this year has resulted in a steady drip of shocking and at times conflicting evidence into the public conversation.
Campus sexual assault isn’t new. Something about this case — the coarseness, the extremity, the failure of trusted institutions to forcefully respond — has triggered widespread revulsion, a sickening shared sense that a boundary no one thought to name has been broken. It has attracted a different kind of attention, as well — with some observers defending the perpetrators, some interrogating the rush to judge them.
There are discussions to be had about agency, responsibility and justice. But we don’t have the shared language to talk about what, exactly, went wrong.
Not that we aren’t trying to talk about it. It’s just that our public conversation feels quibbling, inadequate to the outrage at hand and insensitive to the victim’s humanity. Where does this fall under New York State’s laws? Don’t some women like rough sex? Was it a rape, or was it just a bad experience regretted after the fact?
The last question is at the heart of our shrunken moral vocabulary. “Consent” has become the consensus standard of our time, a compromise between “her body, her choice” sex positivity and a societally necessary condemnation of sexual violence. The consent standard is meant to remove ambiguity without prescribing a larger framework: Sex without consent is rape, and rape is a crime. The certainty of those categories fits neatly into our existing accountability mechanisms as defined by the legal system. Anything outside of rape is a personal affair.
In a society that treats judging others as inappropriate — or at least unfashionable — consent has the appeal of being values-neutral: It defines harm without requiring anyone to make the case for a certain idea of the good. Our reliance on consent as the ultimate arbiter of acceptability has left us unable to recognize and critique bad behavior outside of its narrow definition of criminal sex.
After all, consent here is a legal criterion, not an ethical one — a floor, not a ceiling. It defines the bare minimum, but it doesn’t define the good. That gap between “legal” and “decent” is where moral criticism does its work, but a lack of a moral language strips us of the nuance needed to empathize with victims and to come up with a social, not just a juridical, response. Without that vocabulary, it’s difficult to express what we want our shared sexual culture to look like.
Consent doesn’t help us account for the power differentials of age, gender, experience or intoxication. It doesn’t ask whether the alleged victim entered into the encounter out of genuine desire or because of social pressure, or where one stops and the other begins. It doesn’t leave room to acknowledge that even “just” a regrettable experience can cause lasting harm and that the woman involved is deserving of compassion. What do we owe to each other? Is there no higher standard to which we can hold ourselves?
Any eventual court verdict won’t cure a culture in which misogyny is gaining traction at the highest levels of government and society, embodied by a president who has sheltered virulent misogynists and has himself been found liable for sexual abuse. It won’t reassure skeptical young women that they should trust their male peers. But restoring a moral framework from which to explain why certain beliefs and behaviors are either good or bad would make us better at holding our institutions — and one another — accountable.
“I was a sex doll for all intents and purposes, which is sad,” Jane Doe told a police interviewer in the weeks after her assault. It would be tragic to have the conversation end there.
Christine Emba is a board member of the American Institute for Boys and Men and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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